NY Times Trots Out “Austerity” Regarding Sequester

Nowhere in this article, which could have been written by the White House (but, really, this is just the way Liberals think) is it mentioned that Sequestration is simply a slight reduction in the growth of government

I know, I know, you’re really, really, really broken up about a reduction in government jobs. The reductions are actually in state and local government, not Los Federales.

The federal government, the nation’s largest consumer and investor, is cutting back at a pace exceeded in the last half-century only by the military demobilizations after the Vietnam War and the cold war.

And the turn toward austerity is set to accelerate on Friday if the mandatory federal spending cuts known as sequestration start to take effect as scheduled. Those cuts would join an earlier round of deficit reduction measures passed in 2011 and the wind-down of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that already have reduced the federal government’s contribution to the nation’s gross domestic product by almost 7 percent in the last two years.

What the Times’ also fails to mention is that if that money isn’t in the hands of government it is in the hands of the private sector, which knows a hell of a lot more about responsible spending than government. Of course, that money is not flowing out in this horrendous Obama recovery. And, can you really call it “austerity” when there has been no actual reduction in government spending?

Total government spending continues to increase, but those broader figures include benefit programs like Social Security. Government purchases and investments expand the nation’s economy, just as private sector transactions do, while benefit programs move money from one group of people to another without directly expanding economic activity.

If government spending stimulates, why is the economy stuck in molasses almost 4 years after the Great Recession officially ended? One would think that the $800 billion plus in Stimulus would have done something.

Let’s repeat it for the low information voters: there are no cuts. None. Nothing. No federal agency is going to get less money next year than they did this year. They will simply receive slightly less than they were scheduled to see appropriated.

It’s like this: The Department of Regulating Light Bulb Use received $1 billion this fiscal year. They were scheduled to get $1.1 billion next year. Instead, they will only get $1.098 billion next year, which obviously means that all light bulb enforcement will cease and people will riot in the streets under incandescent bulbs.